• some human activities are progressive, some are not (eg. art, religion)
• Technology is progressive because it is rational.
• Rationality (an objective and logical approach) is appealing because it gives clear answers
• but rationality is limited, can't be used to explain everything in life
• Rationality is a means that can be used towards immoral ends
• the rational world view tends to lead to the idea that the natural world (and even other people) are just there for us to exploit

• for example, if automobiles cause unacceptable pollution, add more technology to the automobile to reduce the pollution (instead of substitution public transportation).
• can technology solve the problems of the ghettos?  Solve the problems of war?
  
• Do we solve a problem like water shortages by persuading people not to water their lawns or not have lawns or by increasingly expensive technological systems to bring water from someplace else?  (Techno-Utopia we seek may be mere illusion)
•  Henry Ford: "We shall solve the city problems by leaving the city."
• "Americans in particular have often seen technological progress as the surest basis for progress in general, and have tended to believe that technological solutions to problems are less painful than solutions that require political or social changes." (Rudi Volti, Society and Technological Change, 3rd edition, p. 16)

 New York

• Social problems are much more complex and harder to solve than technological ones.  Yet technological fixes sometimes work, at least partially.
• The traditional solution to social problems is to try to get people to behave more rationally (or to act for the good of society rather than in their own self-interest).
• Goals are less clear for social problems, eg. stop crime.  Human behavior is hard to change
• technological solutions to social problems tend to be incomplete and to replace one social problem with another.
• how do engineers deal with the social aspects of a problem when they are trained to solve technological problems, not social ones?  (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility)
• is this also an issue for other professions?
  

Society has sometimes looked to engineers for efficiency--this is another kind of technological fix that tries to make an area of human life more rational with the idea that this will make progress possible.

• scientific management sought to rationalize worker behavior
• home economics sought to bring rationalization to the home
• On a larger scale this became the technocracy movement
• Engineers in the 1920s thought that what government needed is more efficiency and that government should be run more by engineers and other technical experts and less by politicians (engineering progressivism).  We have indeed gone in this direction.  (The best book on this is Walter McDougall, ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age)
• In 1932, in the height of the depression, there was a lot of talk about Technocracy--a movement whose leaders proposed to end the depression by a dictatorship of engineers.  Present day members of Technocracy Inc. say this description is an exageration, but the rhetoric at the time came close.
• An alternate view: "The most powerful supporters of stasis are technocrats - people, often in position of power, who believe that the future can and should be engineered." Technocracy RIP

What do we miss when we are focused on progress?
Does technological change always hurts someone?

• can we do anything about it or is that just the price of progress?
• Bill Joy Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
• Luddites:  What's a Luddite?
• Lessons from the Luddites
• Technology, Productivity, and Psychological Needs
• Frank Beacham on technology (a New York City-based writer, a native of Honea Path and the grandson of Dan Beacham, the man who ran Chiquola Mill during the shooting of 1934)